


The Grand Design

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Unknown Ajax - Georgette Heyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brandy - Freeform, Darkest Night 2019, Darkest Night Pinch-hit, Dysfunctional Family, Lace, Multi, One of Us is a Killer, Watch the wall my darling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 23:34:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20750615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Waiting for Lord Darracott to die, Lady Aurelia Darracott patterns lace, and other people's lives.





	The Grand Design

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).

“Well, Frederick,” said Lady Aurelia. “We are coming to the end.”

“No...last wishes,” said Lord Darracott. “Sentimental-”

“Quite so,” said Lady Aurelia.

It was evident Lord Darracott had no more words. There was a speaking look in the glare of his pale blue eyes, hard as marble under the bleached hay straggle of his eyebrows, but he was a wizened caricature of the forceful baronet who had presided over her wedding, his diminished body laid out under the yellowed linens and every breath a trembling ghost. 

The Darracotts, however, had never gone easy. Lady Aurelia settled her lace cushion on the side table, and laid out her pin boxes.

“If there’s one thing I regret about the whole business,” she said, frowning down at the pattern, “It’s that chit of a grand-daughter of yours. Too late now, of course.”

She could hear the brisk rattle of a carriage coming up the driveway. Vincent, she believed, for there was a certain assurance to the sound that bespoke her eldest son. A risk-taker, but one safely circumscribed within the world she had drawn for him. Vincent, well-bred, healthy, and not so wealthy that he could not be reined in when necessary, was an acceptable vehicle for the transmission of the Darracott line. Matthew’s heir.

Claude was hers. 

The lace pattern was French, smuggled from Alençon, but her spools of fine blonde cotton were, as they should be, English. She laid them out. No uneven thread would be allowed to disturb her weaving; experience had taught her it was best to rip out imperfection at the source, root and branch. 

Outside, Vincent greeted the butler Chollacombe with unseemly pleasure, and his swift instruction to the Darracott groom with regard to his horses was dismayingly informal. He had been a mawkish infant, her first-born, overly attached to his nurse and his dogs, and although he had been taught that such expressions of affection for those who could not respond in kind were without purpose he had never outgrown sentimentality. She feared his attachment to the necessary convenience of the Major and his wife followed much the same trajectory, useful as it had proved, although in company with herself, his father and brother Vincent maintained a punctilious and well-bred civility which exactly resembled the image she had worked to install in her children. So much could be disguised under the veneer of respectability. Claude, at least, had learned that lesson well. Vincent, she hoped, given cause, was beginning to do so.

For a moment, holding two almost identical threads up to the window, Aurelia allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. One was perfect in form in shape, perfectly fitted to its purpose, just as it should be. She laid the other aside. It had taken her years, as a girl, to recognise that tools could have a purpose beyond their immediate use. Vincent’s naivety, for example, and his genuine affection for his older relatives, had been remarkably useful in deflecting the suspicion of lesser Darracott connections as she and Lord Darracott had trimmed the family tree.

So many years in black, and worth every moment. She had always looked handsome in darker shades; she had been in mourning when Matthew had proposed. Her unfortunate mother. So...ineffective.

Her embroidery scissors, however, were gratifyingly well kept. The steel was so well tempered thread parted at the merest touch of the blades, wonderfully obedient. 

The linens rustled. She glanced at Lord Darracott, hardly fearing, at this point, a sudden revival, but attentive nevertheless to these final hours. They had been co-conspirators for so many years, had shaped the family to their mutual design, yet this last death was not one of shared responsibility. Experience had made the process so much easier. She could barely recall the girlish qualms with which had accompanied their first endeavour; how much easier the following events had been, once they had mastered the arts of elimination and entrapment and thus the elegant removal of both familial object and the tools of so doing.

Snip.

The provincial footman, for example. How easy it was to manipulate the willing. Claude, of course, could offer a letter of recommendation in that off-hand fashion she herself could not, and the suggestion of a clothing allowance sealed the pact. Already indebted, not even the slightest payment was required to persuade the bumpkin to leave the conservatory doors unlocked, nor to retrieve the special bottle of brandy when Lord Darracott called for a fresh measure. One so easily manipulated was entirely deserving of his fate: no need to arrange another death, merely a well-timed errand at the very point when the press-gang passed through the village. His predecessor, whose assistence had been required in despatching Rupert, had been assigned to the antipodes. The gamble lay, of course, in discerning the correct leverage for each circumstance. A map of the monastery tunnels, for example, for the smugglers who sprung the planks in Granville’s yacht, a thoroughly satisfactory transaction, for neither party could betray the other. 

There was some justice, too, in the watery removal of Granville, a thoroughly unsatisfactory heir who failed to understand the...fluidity...of the electoral system. A Whig! A Whig, worse, with republican inclinations, and an avowed inclination towards land reform for tenant farmers. An unforgivable pollution of the Darracott line – even the unspeakable Brays of H_, once trimmed to size, had kept faith with the natural order of the aristocracy and the concept of land held in perpetuity. Unthinkable that any child except a Darracott inherit that fortune; once she and Lord Darracott had discerned the shape of things, nothing could suit better than that the younger Hugo do so. One had to hand it to the old Lord, for had she not known better, nothing could have persuaded her that he was aware to the shilling of how much the Major was worth. He had been a formidable co-conspirator. 

It was a shame, really, that he too in the end had proved a threat to the Darracotts.

Outside, another carriage was drawing up to the entrance. Flitwick appeared to be making a great fuss about warming pans and hot soup; for one terrible moment, Lady Aurelia considered the unexpected return of Elvira Darracott from her convenient sojourn in Weston-super-Mare – but no; that was the Major’s deep voice, matched by her eldest son, clearly in cheerful mood, and then the lighter tones of Lady Anthea. They appeared to be most affectionate, and in public, no less. She had expected better of Anthea. The shared paternity of the heir the chit carried was a perfect conjunction of her own blood and that of the true Darracott line. Indiscretion on the subject, though, was to be avoided at all costs. Nothing – nothing - could stand in the way of that precious child inheriting. 

Really, it had been such a shame that the disposal of the elder Hugo had become so very necessary. She could have done so much with a man trained to military discipline and well acquainted with the obligations of a Darracott of Darracott. The Major, a generation removed from Lord Darracott’s influence, was less amenable to correction. Nevertheless, his protective tendencies had potential. A word in Claude’s ear, to be passed on at the right moment, and the pitfalls of anything less than absolute discretion would soon become apparent to all three members of that particular liaison. It was a shame that the solution of silence had not been acceptable to the child’s great grandfather.

Deliberately, Aurelia wound the last of the cotton onto the last bobbin. She had, as expected, judged to perfection the resources needed to complete her design. Now, all that was needed was to begin.

The gap between the dying Lord Darracott’s stentorian breaths had widened into minutes. Aurelia, an ear bent to that slow decline, took up her pins, and with satisfactory deliberation, drove the first deep into the heart of the design.


End file.
